My partner kept mentioning that he wanted coloured buttons for his #SteamDeck. After losing my fear of opening up the deck thanks to replacing fan & SSD an idea started forming for a surprise & #projects entry.

So - in secrecy - I designed a 3d printed box to create a 2 part silicone mold of the buttons (taken from my deck), cast them in epoxy resin, applied rub on letters & sealed those in with UV resin.

Really happy with the result, as is he And this is just v1, got some bigger plans

I've now done a proper write-up about this project, you can find it here: https://foosel.net/blog/2023-01-19-custom-steamdeck-buttons

The custom SteamDeck buttons I made for my partner in January 2023 have now been in very heavy use by him for over a year*, and they still look the same as on day 1!

No changes on the letters that I rubbed on and sealed with UV resin, and no changes on the buttons themselves either.

I'm very happy with that long term result and quite proud of my work

* I think not a day goes by without his SteamDeck seeing at least some use ^^

Two years later the custom buttons I created for my partner's Steam Deck are still looking like at the start And they are getting a TON of use

Still proud of the result, and every time I see my partner play with the deck and how happy he is with the buttons it puts a smile on my face 🥰

I sure wish I got comments beyond "oh, those totally look like m&ms!"

Yes, I get it, everyone sees and says that, I've heard it before, please stop

I spent the day creating a new two part mold for the #SteamDeck buttons as the OLED model has slightly different ones and now that my partner also has the OLED model I obviously had to recreate the buttons

I hope the first run with resin works out, we'll only know in 24h. I haven't touched that stuff in over two years now so I'm a bit rusty

In any case I'll now also finally create some for myself

Had some minor overflow from the blue button to the others, and somewhat ironically a small void inside the blue one due to forgetting to cut some bits off the new mold. So a second try it will have to be, but overall I'm happy that the new mold works in principle and that I still know how to do that stuff ^^ Also currently have a mold for the d-pad in the works.

Well, round two of creating new buttons went better! There's still a minor overflow issue (yellow being a bit red) but my partner is happy regardless and so we'll go forward with these.

But I think I'll create another mold with a small channel for overflow issues so that they'll be less of an issue.

Meanwhile, the first attempt on the d-pad is promising but I don't think it'll work this way, the spike in the middle didn't make it. Might be able to fix this on the mold.

Another attempt at the top part of the d-pad mold is in progress. I realized my issues came from having only two channels on the end of two of the four d-pad sides, and nothing in the middle where it has to be the highest. Obviously not the right approach for filling up fully. So now the idea is to have 5 channels, the middle will be used as the input, and I'll fill it until I see the epoxy resin coming out of all four outputs. We'll see if that works better.

And now the new buttons for my partner's deck are labeled (rub-off characters, covered with UV resin) and almost ready ^^

And now they are in

This is btw the reason why I decided to redo the mold for the OLED deck. Left: LCD buttons. Right: OLED buttons. The X is switched (it *looks* symmetrical, but I didn't trust that) and the undersides all got some more slight details on the sides as well.